The missing poster for Abby Patterson. She vanished in early September, stoking fears a serial killer is at work.HANDOUT

Every town has its secrets. Some terrifying. Some unspeakable.

In the classic David Lynch crime thriller Blue Velvet, behind the facade of homogeneous small town tranquillity lurked in monsters, heartache and pain.

Go to Podunkville anywhere and eventually you’ll get the 411 on dirty secrets and bad people.

Blue Velvet took place in Lumberton, N.C.

Abby Patterson has not been seen since early September. FACEBOOK

Population: 21,499.

During the past six months, real life has begun imitating art with three young women dead and two more vanished off the face of the earth.

Severing Lumberton — about 100 km over the state line from Myrtle Beach — is I-95, the main Interstate artery on the U.S. eastern seaboard. It runs from the Canadian border to Miami.

For years, the FBI behavioural science unit has believed cold-blooded killers in the guise of truckers have been plying their vile trade on the nation’s interstate highway system.

Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet, which took place in Lumberton. MGM

Did someone passing through kill, move on, come back, and kill again?

Right now, cops are poo-pooing the notion the harvest of death had been the handiwork of a serial killer.

Except…three of the bodies were found less than 650 ft. apart at different times.

Now, there’s a curveball.

Abby Patterson, 20, disappeared Sept. 5, 2017, without a trace. She was last seen in the middle of the day.

CYNTHIA JACOBS

The three dead women were drug-addicted prostitutes. Abby Patterson was not, although she’d just emerged from a stint in rehab.

This is not to say her life is more valuable than a sex worker but it seems to be a point local detectives are holding onto to dispel the notion a serial killer is in their midst.

Patterson told her mom she would be back in an hour. She was last seen getting into a late-model rusty-brown Buick.

Poof. Gone.

“Those hours turned into months,” her mother Samantha Lovette wrote on Facebook. “It’s not getting any easier and tears still fall every day.”

Cynthia Jacobs, 41, also disappeared within several hundred feet of Patterson. She was also the last person to see Megan Oxendine alive before her body was found, naked, bloody and battered.

Rhonda Jones was found murdered. FACEBOOK

In 2009, two other prostitutes were murdered. Their cases? Ice cold.

“It could be coincidental or it could be that someone out there is targeting prostitutes,” then-police chief Robert Grice told local media.

Could be.

And cops are keeping mum on the wherefores and hows of these tragic investigations. Because the bodies were badly decomposed, the task for cops and the FBI is tougher.

Christina Bennett, 32, and Rhonda Jones, 36, were found murdered on the same day last April. Oxendine — a close friend of Jones — was murdered in June.

She called her friend “sweet and kind.”

“I don’t comprehend with stuff like this too good,” Oxendine, a mother of five, told CBS News. “I don’t understand how somebody could do somebody’s child, mother, niece, like that.”

And in the tiny town of Lumberton where Laura Dern once excitedly said, “the robins are back” after a villainous Dennis Hopper is capped, there is fear.

More likely than not, there are secrets.

And as Bobby Vinton crooned in his 1963 maudlin mega-hit, “I still can see Blue Velvet through my tears.”

ACCUSED PEDO PLUNGES TO DEATH

A New York man who allegedly sexually molested two children at a birthday party was dead on the pavement hours later.

Cops say Edgar Collaguazo, 44, was fleeing furious parents when he plunged to his death from a fourth-floor apartment building.

At the party, Collaguazo allegedly offered to let a five-year-old boy and a little girl watch movies in his room. But when one mom went to check up on her child, she was shocked to discover Collaguazo with his hand down the boy’s pants. The girl said the dead man tried to kiss her.

The enraged parents began pummeling the suspected pervert and locked him alone in the room while they tried to call cops.

When he tried to weasel his way out the window, he fell to his death.

Pedophile David Bonness is wanted by the U.S. Marshals.

MOST WANTED

NAME: DAVID BONNESS

AGE: 49

BACKGROUND: Bonness wins creep of the week. The South Dakota man is wanted by the U.S. Marshals on a slew of pedophilia, rape and sex with underage children charges. In 2008, a 17-year-old girl her mother Bonness had been sexually assaulting her since she was 12. He fled the next day. He is 5-foot-9, 180 lbs. With brown hair and green eyes. He poses a significant threat to the public, the marshals say.

CONTACT: Your local police department or the U.S. Marshals Service at 1-800-336-0102.

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